ALA Tours offers luxury, small-group land & cruise holidays with leading archaeologists. 8oo-748-6 6 aiatours@sover.net www.archaeological.org ' true educational adventure-so 1J1uch n ,QTe than a trip.:' , - oo6Ancient Maya tour participant I ' m : I, /, t' , 1 ' t ..... (276) 492-2085 www.thecrookedroad.org THINK SMALL. To find out how small space ads can have a big impact on your business, visit www.newyorkersmallspace.com. or contact Kristi Adams, at 877-843-6967. Enjoy Fine Art , $> '6 Z: - - &- ':T-P--=::: þ þ- - -" 1 1 . .. SHAKER A collection of re.Rroduction Shaker furniture. Do-it-yourselfkits or custom finished. FREE CATALOG 1-800-840-9121 SHAKER WORKSHOPS Box 8001-NY, Ashburnham, MA 01430 ---- ', .' :& BABBITT'S AND PENDLETON \.. Y 9 PRESENT The Historic Oraibi Trading Post c::> c: C:":. . ' , Commemorattve Trade Blanket . () 0 $185.00 Plus shipping and applicable tax 1: .. \;; .. .'. To Order: (877) 527-0479 140 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 4, 2006 analysis of the broken levees, and at- tempts at rebuilding. My guess is that Lee didn't have the heart to cut down the terrifYing footage he had gathered or the mostly remarkable interviews that con- stitute the main body of the movie. Keeping his own voice largely absent and his presence invisible, he finds the city's tattered survivors. He also consults a va- riety of lawyers and local politicians, and such luminaries as Harry Belafonte and Al Sharpton; the musicians and New Orleans natives Wynton Marsalis and Terence Blanchard (the latter wrote much of the beautiful music for the film); the historian Douglas Brinkley, who makes impassioned critiques of Bush Administration officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency; and the Mississippi man ( a doctor) who pub- licly advised the Vice-President, when he visited the area long after the storm, to go fuck himself Lee draws on stock, news, and ama- teur footage, and also on still photo- graphs, some of which capture, with the devastating power of the greatest poetry or painting, the charnel house on water that New Orleans had become. In the four hours, there are repetitive passages but nothing that isn't arresting or mov- ing, and, for all its length, 'When the Levees Broke" is essentially a lyric work-a kind of blues documentary, saturated in New Orleans's founda- tional music and warmed with the tra- ditions of cadenced outrage and lament heard in the Lower Ninth Ward and other abused neighborhoods. 'When I seen the water, I knew we had to get out," a man recalls. He says he told his mother that they had to leave: "And she say, Why we have to go?' And I explain it to her that the water was comin' up, risin' up" -an exchange that sounds like lines from a Delta-blues classic. The co-producer of the film, Sam Pollard, was also the chief editor, and, with his editing team (Geeta Gandbhir and Nancy Novack), he shifts among the interviews, hurricane footage, and stills with an almost tidal alternation of emo- tional intensity and rest. In a video montage, grouped shots of corpses floating in the water or sprawled on a car roof are held long enough for us to register the horror of abandonment but not so long that the shots draw atten- tion to themselves as spectacle. The movie is heroic in the delicacy of its craftsmanship. After the storm, with the government gone, their houses wrecked or displaced, and both official and private papers de- stroyed in the flood, the residents of such places as the Lower Ninth lack elemen- tary validation. Stubbornly, they cling to their lots, virtual squatters on their own property. Spike Lee finds them there, planted amid stray boards and rotted couches. In his feature films, Lee has al- ways possessed a gift for tirade, but this time he doesn't have to write anything; he has only to release the flow. A few of his subjects are sombre and stunned, but others scorch the camera with the feroc- ity of their invective, especially a forty- two-year-old Mrican- American woman named Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, who is blessed with a special skill: as her tem- per rises, she gets funnier and funnier, and Lee brings her back repeatedly as she re-creates the stages of official bungling in the aftermath of the storm-the de- lays, the incomprehensible orders, the simple failure on the part of people alleg- edly trained to handle emergency to un- derstand how emergency works. The movie has a surprising amount of joking and New Orleans mischief and orneri- ness. There's one element that seems un- redeemable-the dead citizens lying all over the city, bloated and discolored. It's the primal curse of the Greek myths: the unburied corpse, an offense against the gods and against civilization, too. That's why the mock funeral at the end of the movie, whatever its precise meaning, is the most eloquent of gestures. Society may have collapsed, but a proper burial is still fitting. The citizens ofN ew Orleans graciously grant to the storm the courtesy that the storm, in its rage, could not grant to them. I n the accurately named "Snakes on a Plane," the snakes bite the passengers on the neck, the chest, the eyes, and even more vulnerable spots; they slither into the cockpit, wrap themselves around ox- ygen masks, and investigate the under- clothes of a middle-aged woman. A non-poisonous snake-a boa constric- tor-eats a dog and an Englishman. There isn't much that the snakes don't do, except perhaps pick better movies for the long-haul flights. The audience goes to a movie like this in a spirit of low con-